U.S. News

This actually happens a lot more frequently than one might think. Offhand in the US alone beyond the Sunshine Skyway and Baltimore Key collapses in the last half century we’ve seen the I-40, Queen Isabella Causeway, and Bayou Canot passenger rail collapses after a ship or barge collision.

The closest parrel so far though might be the Tazman bridge collapse in Hobart, Australia, as that also involved a oceangoing freighter impacting a intracity bridge at night.

The main similarity to Sunshine Skyway here would be that it appears the bridge was built at the same time and from the same template. Overall though, when a building sized chunk of steel designed to crash though walls of water bigger than it is meets a spindly structure designed to primarily withstand wind and snow the results tend to end badly.

That’s why modern post-skyway dolphins or bartier islands are so important, but they’re expensive and at a time when we have generally failed to fund even basic preventative maintenance it’s hard to find the funds for expensive systems that may never be used. After all, the bridge has been fine for decades without, right?